Hi, i'm asking a question, i would like to know if Gentoo is better than a binary-distro in terms of performances for video games emulation ? I mean, if i compile wine and stuff with march=native, will i get better performances ?

I don't think it would be noticeably faster. What is more likely to make a difference is if you tune your entire system to remove unnecessary programs. For example, you probably don't need 20 or so daemons running in the back ground that a binary distro might start automatically.

That said, it certainty shouldn't be worse. What may be significantly better or worse is the version of wine you are running. I have experienced new releases going both ways for particular programs.

Of course the use flags you set may make a substantial difference._________________First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Hi, i'm asking a question, i would like to know if Gentoo is better than a binary-distro in terms of performances for video games emulation ? I mean, if i compile wine and stuff with march=native, will i get better performances ?

Thanks.

Nowadays, no, it doesn't make a noticeable difference.

Only in some extraordinary cases (number crunching, video encoding, and a few others) it *can* make a difference, but, video games are mostly I/O and GPU bound.

For the former, the only thing that really matters is wine and the kernel I/O scheduler (and your hardware and drivers, of course). For the later, and assuming you are using a binary blob from ATI or Nvidia, you can't recompile anyway.

The real benefit from Gentoo is, in my book, being able to control every single aspect on your OS. Having the sources directly available makes it a great development platform as well. But if you came looking for 200% speed you are probably on the wrong track. The only path to that is to buy a machine that's 200% faster. _________________Gentoo Handbook | My website

It's all Linux, so you can make the tweaks to the "binary" distros too.

jvp777 wrote:

video games

Some hints I've picked up along the way:

BFS (CPU scheduler) is noticeably smoother than the default CFS.
Use a lightweight GUI (e.g. XFCE), without composite (which can only degrade OpenGL performance, e.g. with Nvidia).
Prioritize the game, using nice and ionice.
With wine, use realtime patch.
If on 32-bit, don't compile with PIC (it's slow on 32-bit).
Use TSC, as the fastest clocksource.

It's all Linux, so you can make the tweaks to the "binary" distros too.

jvp777 wrote:

video games

Some hints I've picked up along the way:

BFS (CPU scheduler) is noticeably smoother than the default CFS.
Use a lightweight GUI (e.g. XFCE), without composite (which can only degrade OpenGL performance, e.g. with Nvidia).
Prioritize the game, using nice and ionice.
With wine, use realtime patch.
If on 32-bit, don't compile with PIC (it's slow on 32-bit).
Use TSC, as the fastest clocksource.

It results in lower CPU overhead and less io wait. Very noticeable with a mechanical HDD, and I still "feel" the difference with SSD drives._________________CFLAGS="-OmgWTFR1CE --fun-lol-loops --march=asmx86go"